Conceptualizing Politics

2.   The rise of the modern state in Europe
What we are going to become acquainted with in the following is the rise of the 
modern state, which took place in Europe and subsequently spilled over to other 
continents and very different peoples.
Nationes/peoples were recognised elements of the political, military and legal 
structure of the Roman empire and became ever more relevant with the process 
called in French, Italian and Spanish ‘barbarian invasions’ and in German in a more 
neutral key ‘Völkerwanderungen/people’s migrations’– understandably, given that the 
migrating peoples were almost all Germanic. Along with other domestic and exter-
nal factors, this led to the demise of the empire and the establishment of ‘national’, 
or rather ethnic, kingdoms in the western-European countries, minus the part of 
the Iberian peninsula which had been occupied, since AD 711, by the Umayyad 

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60  How politics works
Arabs (Al-Andaluz or the Emirate of Granada, as it was later called). The Roman 
Empire was re-founded in the year AD 800 under the Christian aegis, as the Holy 
Roman Empire, by the king of Franks Charlemagne, who was crowned by Pope 
Leo III the new ‘emperor of the Romans’. Through continuous wars of submission, 
Charles the Great’s empire came to comprise approximately France, Germany and 
Italy, plus the strips of Catalonyan/Spanish territory that were taken away from 
Arab rule. Its claim to being universal, as well as its source of legitimacy, relied on 
the alleged continuation of the Roman past: it was recognised by the pope as the 
polity of the (western-European) Christians and gave institutional shape to the res 
publica christiana, as it was later called by emperor Friedrich II (1194–1250). This 
claim ended substantially with the Treaties of Westphalia (1648) and was formally 
cancelled as late as in 1806 by Napoleon.
In medieval Europe, the other power with universal claims was the Roman 
Church, although it was weakened by the separation (1054) from the Eastern 
Orthodox Church of Constantinople and later the Reformation, which Martin 
Luther started in 1517. Rome was regarded as the source of the true Christian doc-
trine and the supreme authority in sacramental issues,
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 as well as in the legitimation 
of temporal authorities, first and foremost with those of the emperor. Charlemagne 
also transferred territories in the Italian peninsula under direct political rule of 
the pope, thus creating the temporal power of the Church, which lasted until 1870, 
when Rome was taken to the pope and became the capital of the newly founded 
Kingdom of Italy. In spite of bitter strife between popes and emperors, disunion and 
wars in the empire, as well as corruption of various types and degrees in the Roman 
Church, on the front of legal (top-down) legitimacy, the claims of the two univer-
sal powers lasted until the dawn of modern politics in the sixteenth–seventeenth 
centuries. This edifice of power and recognition was reinforced, but also ossified, 
by the hereditary personal dependence of power holders on the next upper level 
of patrician bondage, up to the king and/or the emperor. This was the feudal system, 
whose structure is well-known also in very different countries and cultures as in 
ancient China, and elements of which survive still now in not yet fully modernised 
societies, in organised crime networks, but also in niches inside the democratic